Monday, August 23, 2010

"Scissors are good, music is better, and mixed drinks with friends are best. Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical. Edit yourself, but let someone else censor you."

"Success is generating an emotion. Failure is a million different things."

Monday, August 16, 2010

A short list of nursery school thoughts from a recent favorite, Preschool Gems:

“Plants are more important than games.” “I love all cakes, except some cakes I don’t like.” “But I’m going somewhere even excitinger.” “I don’t think anything.” “Wizards are true.” “The good force is like the main force, the evil force is like the second force. Don’t use the evil force, just the good force.”

When they arrive throughout the day, I can’t help but think of Sir Ken Robinson’s insight earlier this year on creativity and education:

Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’re not frightened of being wrong. I’m not saying that wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. … And we run our companies that way — we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. We’re educating people out of their creative capacities.